Service Cuts

In an effort to close an unexpected budget gap of nearly $400 million, the MTA this morning unveiled a plan to cut services across the city. While two subway lines and a few bus routes will be eliminated and service on others severely reduced, the city’s students and disabled are the hardest hit in the latest round of cuts.

As the Gary Dellaverson, MTA CFO, explained this morning, this new budget gap developed early last week when payroll tax totals came in at around $200 million below expectations. The state has since revised that number upward to $100 million below expectations, but that $100 million combined with lower expectations for 2010, a late-year cut of $143 million in appropriations to the MTA and a labor arbitration ruling that will add $91 million to the MTA’s bottom line next year has led to a deficit of $383 million. Since the agency has promised to avoid a fare hike until 2011, cuts are on the table.

“To present a balanced budget despite losing hundreds of millions of dollars in State funding over the past two weeks requires measures that are painful to the MTA, our employees and our customers,” Dellaverson said to the MTA’s finance committee. “Given the ongoing downturn in the broader economy and the resultant economic crisis facing the State, we have worked to balance the budget while maintaining our commitment to riders not to increase fares in 2010.”

And the cuts are severe. In addition to reviving the Doomsday service cuts, the MTA will rollback the student discount for MetroCards and will pare down services to the disabled until they meet the bare federal minimums under the Americans with Disabilities Act. At a time when the agency has few choices, it’s certainly taking the ones bound to attract the most political attention. The financial summary and board presentation, available here and here, respectively, as PDFs, tell a tale of reduced service across the board.

The MTA plans to:

• Discontinue W and Z subway routes; terminate G subway route at Court Street;
• Increase subway headways on weekends and early mornings; increase off-peak subway load guidelines;
• Adjust express bus service to reflect demand and eliminate low performing weekend express bus service;
• Discontinue and restructure local bus service on low-performing routes;
• Eliminate Rockaway-resident Cross Bay toll rebate program;
• Reduce car consists and increase load standards; and
• Reduce service, on Commuter Railroads.

Although everyone will suffer from reduced service, more crowded midday trains and fewer overall options, students and disabled passengers will see a drastic change of transportation quality. As I noted this morning, the MTA seemed ready to axe student MetroCards, and that plan is now official. With Gov. David Paterson starting the day by saying that his hands were tied and the Daily News reporting that state contributions to student transit costs were down to just $6 million, the MTA could no longer afford to fork over nearly $170 million in voluntary subsidies for student travel.

Under the new plan, the MTA will move to a half-price discount for students in September 2010 and phase out the Student MetroCard program entirely in September 2011. By delaying the elimination of these free rides, the MTA is giving Albany ample time to find money for the program. The MTA should not be expected to foot the bill for a program the city and state once promised to fund in full. “The MTA” the financial summary says, “can no longer afford to subsidize this free service and, therefore, is proposing a roll back of the discount for school transportation.”

As for paratransit service reductions, the MTA is vague on the specifics. Michael Grynbaum reports that the authority will provide paratransit service only to the nearest handicap-accessible subway station and that door-to-door service will be eliminated entirely. The agency’s documents call for cost savings of $40 million in 2010 and $80 million in 2011 through “improvements in scheduling efficiency, an increase in the use of vouchers and taxis, better coordination of feeder service with accessible fixed route service, improved eligibility screening, and the elimination of the most expensive carriers.” No matter the end result, the MTA’s services for the disabled will be simply, as I said, the bear minimum required by law.

I’ll have more on these catastrophic cuts over the next few, but I want to leave you for now again with Andrew Albert’s quote. This is a mess of Albany’s doing, and our elected representatives are trying to wash their hands of it. That injustice just cannot stand. As Albert said, “To have this situation in the most transit-dependent city in the country is a complete failure of government.”

Although the MTA will not officially unveil its plans to close a $200 million budget gap until Monday, the Daily News is reporting that the Doomsday cuts are back on the table. As I speculated on Wesdnesday, the MTA will be proposing the same sweeping service reductions the agency nearly implemented earlier this year before Albany’s half-hearted bailout came to be.

The sweeping reductions would include the deaths of the W and Z lines, the overnight shuttering of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn stations along the BMT Broadway (N/R) line and the elimination of numerous low-ridership bus lines in the city’s outer boroughs. Pete Donohue has more:

Facing a massive budget crisis, the cash-squeezed MTA is moving to implement sweeping service cuts – again – including shutting down dozens of bus routes. Two subway lines also would be wiped off the map and four stations would be shuttered overnight under the plan expected to go before a Metropolitan Transportation Authority committee on Monday. If it sounds familiar, it is. The lineup is the same roster of reductions threatened earlier this year when the MTA was lobbying for a state bailout. The cuts never happened.

But in recent weeks the MTA has been rocked by bad news. The state – struggling with its own budget mess – slashed transit funding by $143 million. And cash from state payroll taxes is coming in about $200 million short of what the state had planned for mass transit. Even with 2010 service cuts, the MTA will have to find other ways to plug the sudden budget gap, sources said.

“We’re not going to rely on anyone else to do anything for us. We’re going to rely on ourselves,” MTA board member Mitchell Pally said.

Transit watchdogs were quick to bemoan the latest news. Relying on its call to use stimulus funds to cover the budget gap, Gene Russianoff and the Straphangers Campaign came out swinging today: “For the MTA, reviving these cuts would shred their credibility. The riding public was told last May that there would be no service cuts when the legislature bailed out the MTA. Riders held up their part of the bargain with a fare hike last June, yet now they are threatened with getting substantially less while paying more. Riders have every right to be mad as hell.”

Russianoff acknowledged that the latest budget problems are a result of “actions by Governor Paterson and the state legislature.” He stressed, however, his opinion that the MTA should do anything possible to avoid cuts to service because those cuts are rarely restored lately when the financials improve. “The Straphangers Campaign,” he said, “believes the MTA has the resources to prevent the service cuts, especially if it uses available federal stimulus funds and capital funds now coming out of the operating budget.”

Meanwhile, in the Daily News article, new TWU head John Samuelsen urged the MTA to look inward. “Before the MTA takes any action that adversely affects riders or workers, they should look to cut their own wasteful spending,” Samuelsen said. Considering the public opinion of TWU workers these days, Samuelsen should be careful with his words. Most riders may not be big fans of the MTA, but they are hardly on the side of the employees either.

In the end, I want to toss the ball to another player. Michael Bloomberg campaigned heavily on a plan to fix the MTA and improve mass transit for all New Yorkers. He has been noticeably silent this week as the MTA’s financial picture has taken a huge hit. It’s time for the Mayor to step up to the plate for the MTA. He can use his political clout to gain some monetary concessions for the authority, and he can show to those who voted for him that they were not misguided in putting faith in his transit proposal. Now’s the time; next week just might be too late.

When news broke early Monday evening that Albany’s MTA bailout would fall $200 million short of expectations, officials at the MTA began to scramble. At the time, agency representatives could not comment on the scope of the measures the MTA would have to take to close a potential budget gap. But in five days, MTA CFO Gary Dellaverson will have to present a balanced budget to the Board’s finance committee. As of now, those at the authority do not know what form the impending service cuts will take.

And service cuts they will be for the MTA has sworn not to raise fares. We could debate the merits of that decision for a while, and once the MTA’s budget adjustments become clear, we will. This morning, though, let’s look back to the MTA’s Doomsday service cuts proposal from last December. Facing a massive budget gap far greater than the one currently looming, the authority proposed a massive package of service cuts and fare hikes. Much of the service cuts were behind the scenes; the authority had proposed nearly $100 million in personnel reductions at levels from upper management to station cleaners.

Yet, the most costly public cuts were those to train and bus service. The service cuts were extensive and inconvenient. To make matters worse, they barely represented much of a cost savings. The plan below was on the table last year. Keep in mind that the dollar figures are a year stale.

• Terminate the G at Court Square
  Net Annual Savings: $1.9 million
• Operate the N via the Manhattan Bridge Late Nights
  Net Annual Savings: $390,000
• Eliminate the W; extend the Q to Astoria Weekdays; operate the N local in Manhattan
  Net Annual Savings: $3 million
• Eliminate M between Broad Street and Bay Parkway; eliminate Z and J/Z skip-stop service; and operate J local between Jamaica Center and Myrtle Avenue
  Net Annual Savings: $2.4 million
• Operate 10-Minute headway on B division Weekends
  Net Annual Savings: $5 million
• 125 percent of seated-load weekday middays and evenings
  Net Annual Savings: $8.4 million
• 30-Minute Headways 2 a.m.-5 a.m.
  Net Annual Savings: $4.1 million
• Total Net Annual Savings: $25.19 million

When the MTA proposes service cuts such as these, their aims are political as much as they are practical. These cuts would have impacted an estimated one million passengers a day but represented just a fraction of the $1.2 billion the agency had to find last year. This year, the same slate of cuts would, if we assume a budget gap of $200 million, cover a little over 10 percent of the needed cost savings. It’s a plan with a rather disproportionate impact considering its price tag.

But should we expect anything less? Already, Albany is warning the MTA not to expect another bailout even though these gap, termed “shocking” by Dellaverson, came about due to a state — and not an MTA — accounting error. The MTA has little choice but to cut.

And so we wait until Monday morning when the budgetary axe comes down. I’d prefer to see a fare hike and not service cuts because once the MTA starts cutting service, the agency rarely restores what is lost. Once the W and Z trains are axed, once midday headways increase, once the Lower Manhattan local stations on the BMT Broadway line are shuttered overnight, that’s it. New York won’t see those service return until the city and state drastically rethink their approaches to financing mass transit, and that would be a shame for subway-dependent New Yorkers of all stripes.

While the MTA’s Doomsday budget with fare hikes and service cuts for all is but a memory, one aspect of the plan — the reduction of station agents throughout the system — remains set for a Sept. 20 rollout. On that day, the MTA will begin phasing out station agents through attrition, and eventually, the system will be leaner the payroll and quite possibly meaner for straphangers fearing for their safety at half-empty stations.

As it became clear after the Albany bailout passed that the MTA would still be cutting these agents, I’ve looked skeptically at their roles in the system. In my non-verified opinion, these station agents provide the illusion of safety. They can’t stop crime and are forbidden from leaving their booths to assist passengers in need. They can provide directions, place phone calls and just sit there as a deterrent presence.

During the build-up to these staffing cuts, the MTA has pursued this line of thinking as well. Straphangers support the agents, but the MTA has claimed that agents field on average less than a handful of support requests every hour. They are, says the transit authority, largely superfluous.

Our city comptroller disagrees. William C. Thompson has written to the MTA Board a scathing indictment of the MTA’s internal report on the station agent program. While the letter, as of this writing, isn’t up yet on Thompson’s website, Heather Haddon has more:

An internal MTA study used to justify the closure of station agent booths across the subway system is “faulty” and “defective,” according to city Comptroller William Thompson.

In a letter sent to the MTA board Wednesday, Thompson blasted the agency’s reasoning in closing 105 booths manned by red-vested station agents later this month, countering many of the MTA’s arguments and the way the survey was conducted. “The report appears to have been written … with the goal of demonstrating that the (station agent) program is a failure,” he wrote…

Thompson’s office said it found that the station agents were busy, helping passengers a total of 820 times during the observation period. Workers assisted riders every three minutes at more than a third of the stations. The transit survey also said that agents did not deter crime, with felonies in the system down drastically since 2002. But Thompson argued that the report did not address misdemeanor crimes like theft or harassment, which are more common than felonies.

I’ll reserver further judgment until I have a chance to review Thompson’s charges, but if rigorous, his claims would give me pause. The MTA is going to save $16 million through 2010 as they eliminate these station agents. If Thompson’s charges hold water, the city could easily see those savings vanish through inefficiencies and an increase in subway crimes — including vandalism.

The station agents are indicative of a larger problem with running a system such as New York’s. Because the city is open for business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, the subways must be too. Because the track mileage is vast, the system is relatively open, and controlled access points — along with people to man those points — are relatively scarce. The MTA can only cut back so many services, so many station agents, before the cuts take a collective toll on the safety, security and stability of the subway system.

As the station agents hit the chopping block in less than three weeks, the MTA will engage in a real-life experiment in subway security. Can the subways operate without the station agents? Can they operate efficiently with them? We’ll find out, but this debate is far from over.

Oh, those pesky station agents. Last week, in voting down the Doomsday fare hike, the MTA Board noted that station agent cuts remain on the table. As it always does, the topic engendered much discussion about the impact — real vs. perceived — that these agents have on subway safety.

It has long been my take that these agents offer up a deterrent force but don’t actually do much to stop crimes or quality-of-life violations in progress. A potential perp may be less likely to hop a turnstile in plain sight of a station agent, but no one will stop him or her from defacing a poster or littering.

As the MTA gears up to assess the fate of their maroon-vested employees, advocates and politicians are decrying the planned cuts. amNew York’s Heather Haddon has more:

Transit groups and some city officials are blasting the MTA’s plan to shrink the number of station agents roving the system, saying the cut saves little money while putting riders at risk.

In an average year, the red-vested station agents signal for emergency responders 85 times per station, according to the most recent data available from the Straphangers Campaign.

“All the statistics in the world about crime being down is not going to take that fear and concern (about security) away,” said Bobbie Sackman, an advocate with the Council of Senior Center and Services.

According to Haddon, those who oppose the planned cuts — including mayoral hopeful and current comptroller William Thompson — plan to protest on Monday in front of the 77th St. station on Lexington Ave. The MTA has long defending the cuts by noting that every station will have at least one employee on duty at all times. Of course, that’s little consolation for lost passengers if that employee is on the wrong side of, say, Brooklyn’s 4th Ave. in a station with no connection between the downtown and uptown platforms.

The telling part of Haddon’s story though is Sackman’s quote. Crime is down, and station agents seem to ring for emergency responders every four days. We probably won’t find out just how much subway crime will increase until and unless those agents are eliminated. Is that a chance we should be willing to take?

Does the city need someone to staff these ubiquitous booths?

When the MTA Board met yesterday to approve a reduced fare hike, the authority’s governing body also discussed, albeit briefly, the service cuts that made up part of the Doomsday budget. While the so-called cuts to the public — the elimination of subway lines, the planned reduction in off-peak, weekend and overnight service — are off the table, I was surprised to learn that the MTA still plans to axe hundreds of station agent jobs throughout the system.

As I reported in January, the plans to cut the station booths were a stealth move by the MTA. The agency stopped filling vacancies last month and is hoping to phase out around 800 station agents and shutter around 42 booths. While every station will still have an open, manned booth with a token clerk in it, the red vest program will end, and some one-way stations — an uptown platform with no crossover to a downtown train, for example — will have no employees at all.

During yesterday’s fare hike hearing, union leaders and station workers were apoplectic over these cuts. Andreeva Pinder, TWU Local 100’s VP for stations, defended the station agents. “I’ve meant the different between living and dying,” she said.

Pinder discussed how she and other station agents have helped people in need who come in off the streets, how they can aid confused passengers and how they contribute to the overall safety of the stations. She was pretty outraged by the cuts. “What in the hell are you thinking about?” she asked the MTA Board as she finished her remarks.

Kendra Hill, another station agent and TWU Local 100 member, defended the station agents as well. “A MetroCard vending machine cannot help a parent with a stroller. A turnstile cannot give directions to lost travelers,” she said.

Initially, my reaction to Hill one of cynicism. It’s true that a turnstile can’t give directions, but in my experiences, neither can many station agents. While Pinder tells a story about her helping people, the news covers the tales when station agents do nothing in the face of danger.

What if, though, those stories make headlines because they are far more compelling than the alternate? Who wants to read a feel-good piece in The Post that says “Station agent helps lost straphanger find her way”? Dale Hemmerdinger, the chairman of the MTA Board, put it best yesterday. “Unfortunately, it’s human nature to remember only when something doesn’t work, and in that regard, we’re a very easy target,” he said.

So maybe the station agents do help out, but maybe, as I’ve written in the past, they serve a deterrent purpose. Simply by putting someone in the station, the MTA can deter fare-jumpers and would-be criminals. Simply by alerting riders to the presence of someone with a uniform, the MTA is creating second thoughts.

Of course, this doesn’t seem to stop would-be taggers and graffiti artists. It doesn’t stop people from littering or relieving themselves in subway stations. It may stop major crimes, but quality-of-life violations continue unabated.

When the MTA cuts the station agents, they plan to keep open the turnstiles at unstaffed stations. Fare-jumping could become rampant, and the cuts — some $52 million annually — will be eroded by petty crime. Soon enough, we’ll find out if it’s worth it. I’m not so sure it is.